Sword

by JC Andrijeski

“You studied this, right?” I said. “You know something about it?”

  I realized then, that all of them had gone quiet, and stared up at the thing with grim expressions.

  “We had no way to do so, Esteemed Bridge,” Wreg said. “Only humans are allowed inside, and they memory-wiped all those we were able to ID. Boss made the call we’d go in anyway, if you were here.”

  “Me?” I looked at him blankly. “I don’t know anything about machines. Much less a dinosaur like this.”

  Wreg just shrugged, looking up at the thing.

  We had to make sense of this monstrosity, at least well enough to direct Revik to the right general vicinity so he could dismantle it. He likely couldn’t melt the whole thing from the ground up, not unless he had a massive influx of light from somewhere, and even then, I imagined it would take hours.

  He couldn’t exactly follow us around in here for the next hour or so, either, while we tried to make sense of the thing. Even crouched in a closet somewhere––even splitting his consciousness four ways from Sunday––he couldn’t be distracted for that long inside the Registry building without putting his own life in danger.

  Wherever he was, I knew he was monitoring more than just us.

  I looked at Garensche.

  He returned my gaze, frowning. When I motioned towards the machine, the big seer smiled, signing something to me.

  Wreg translated. “He can’t talk to this beast. No organic parts.”

  I knew that much. “What’s plan B?” I said.

  “C-4,” Wreg said, glancing at me. “Evenly dispersed around the machine. Then detonated by your husband.”

  I looked at him, then up at the machine. “You brought that much?”

  He shrugged. “It would be better to be precise. No guarantee the Sword can find something else in here to ignite. They likely stripped it of anything combustible at that scale.”

  Nodding, I glanced around where we stood, only then noticing four unconscious bodies lying on the floor by the cement walls. The two nearest to the door had been holding machine guns before they’d been knocked out.

  It occurred to me that Revik had done that for us too, clearing the way.

  It also occurred to me to wonder why they didn’t have more seers in here, on the ground. It was kind of foolhardy to rely on a construct alone.

  Then I remembered the vats, and thought I knew.

  They couldn’t trust seers with this––any seers.

  It was like paying Jews to guard Auschwitz.

  “There’s no guarantee it will work,” Wreg went on. “If we don’t place the explosive correctly, there could be fragments left over, things they could rebuild. We need something more foolproof than a guess. We have to try and be precise, princess… at least until we are out of options and must leave.”

  I stared at the machine.

  Walking around to the back of it, I used the imprints in my light to recall specifics from the crash course we all got in non-organic computers while we were being briefed in Santos. I probably had more direct experience with non-organics––or “dead” machines, as the seers thought of them––than the majority of the seers there, but that experience was limited to handhelds, personal computers, headsets. All were small, and operated on servers I’d never laid eyes on. All were hooked into some kind of network.

  All were built within the last sixty years.

  I couldn’t even pretend to know about this.

  Honestly, just placing all of our explosives somewhere as close to the middle of the monster as possible and blowing it up wasn’t seeming like a terrible plan to me.

  “He wants inside,” Wreg said. “The boss. He wants confirmation.”

  When I glanced at him, the Chinese-looking seer shrugged.

  “You know him,” he said. “He doesn’t like chance. And only one shot at this, Esteemed Bridge. They move the data, we’re done. Could be years before we find it and infiltrate well enough to crack the new security protocols. We already have intel about their intention to upgrade. And someone good with these kinds of machines…” Trailing, he gestured towards the beast. “They could rebuild a lot. More than you might think.”

  Seeing my eyebrow go up at this, he clicked softly.

  “I worked in jobs with humans who were experts in these kinds of dead machines. Back during the war. If they move the data, we’d have to find the new location, the new security, get our people inside to map out, decrypt––”

  “No, I get that.”

  I did, too. He was talking a few years, minimum.

  “So when you said you’ve worked with these kinds of machines before––” I began.

  Wreg shook his head though, before I’d finished. “No, princess. Not the machines, just the techs. But I heard them talk. I know what they can do. They’d recovered such machines from fires, from bombings. Also from Syrimne, Esteemed Bridge.”

  I nodded, biting my lip. Looking around, I saw a row of smaller workstations against the wall. I walked over and sat in one of the swivel chairs.

  Even the chairs looked about fifty years old.

  Picking up a thick, non-organic headset that had an actual cord, I put it on. Nothing happened. I looked for where it was plugged in, but only found a hole where the wire connected. I touched the screen…

  …and it shocked me.

  Remembering the lessons we’d gotten in Santos, I realized I wasn’t looking at a normal, semi-organic or even LCD screen, but an old-fashioned cathode ray tube, or CRT monitor. I even vaguely remembered the odd flickerings of the screen, like the antique my mother had when Jon and I were kids.

  I frowned, dumbfounded, trying to remember if there was anything important about that, other than the fact that I wouldn’t be able to access anything by touching the screen.

  Looking around, I opened drawers and felt over the tabletop. Finally, I found a sliding tray attached beneath the linoleum desktop.

  Pulling it out, I uncovered a keyboard with raised black keys. I stared at it, then back at the screen, which contained only a single word of white text and a blinking cursor.

  The text said, “NAME.”

  Experimenting, I typed in my own name, using two fingers.

  A different screen popped up, asking for a password.

  I stared at it, then at the keyboard. Using my light, I tried to keep the flare minimal as I scanned the keys, looking for those that had been hit the most frequently. Gradually, eleven letters glowed faintly brighter than the others.

  Memorizing them with my light, I reconfigured them in my mind in a number of different combinations to try and spell out something that made sense to me. At first, I couldn’t come up with anything. Then I noticed three of the letters stood out even more prominently than the other nine my aleimi highlighted.

  “Jesus,” I muttered, forgetting the subvocalization.

  “What, Bridge?” Wreg said.

  I didn’t answer. Next to “PASSWORD?” I typed “ICEBLOODPRICKS.”

  The password screen disappeared.

  Seconds later, a new screen popped up, showing me a record made up mainly of yellow-colored text. A picture of me, naked and chained to a bench, stared back at me. I knew exactly when it had been taken. I’d been processed by customs in that cell, right before I’d been imprisoned in the White House. My skin looked pale, covered in bruises, and I looked thin, my eyes overly large and faintly glassy from the drugs Terian had been feeding me.

  The image appeared next to a form with all of my vital stats, a list of school records and known residences, what they knew of my seer skill sets (which wasn’t much, thank god, even next to telekinesis they had “unverified”), relatives of my adoptive human family, work and school friends, where I’d been born, my sentience category (non-sentient, thank you very much), ownership status (still the official property of the United States Government… again, thank you very much), and medical records from when I lived in San Francisco.

  I was categorized as “found” updated to “owned
” and then “fugitive.” The most current date at the bottom listed me as “status unknown.”

  Next to the form question “MATED PAIR?” someone had typed a question mark, and referenced a connected record: Dehgoies, Revik.

  Under the question, “IMPLANTED?” it said “YES.”

  A serial number had been typed into the box following. I noticed it started with the same prefix numbers as United States phone numbers and the letters “CSFH” followed by my social security number and some extra digits on the end.

  I touched the back of my neck, fingering the hard bump under my skin, another souvenir from my time at the White House. Revik had already told me they were going to “take care of that,” as soon as we finished the op here in Brazil.

  He’d already done something to foul up the GPS tracker, but SCARB put small explosives in the implants themselves, making them dangerous as hell to remove.

  It had been more than a little annoying, setting off every alarm in the building every time I tried to use anything close to public transport in any country other than India or Nepal. Balidor handled it, of course, while I’d traveled with the Seven, but it made border-crossings a lot more time-consuming.

  I scrolled through the menu, which also looked about a hundred years old, and flipped through options until I found one called “delete record.”

  The machine asked me if I was sure I wanted to delete the record.

  Yes, I was sure.

  It asked me the reason for the deletion. I tried typing in a number of different permutations, trying to get it to see the record as invalid, but the machine wouldn’t accept any of them.

  Finally, I typed in “DECEASED.”

  The screen disappeared. Shortly after, so did my record.

  “That’s going to be a bit time-consuming,” Wreg remarked through the transmitter. “Our numbers aren’t what they used to be, princess, but we hardly have time to delete over eighty million records.”

  I glanced up at him. I knew he was right, of course.

  Further, they would be recoverable if we did it that way, even in this antique. I was chipping around the edges of something that felt impenetrable to me.

  But I supposed that was the idea.

  For a moment longer I just sat there, thinking.

  I found myself remembering something Vash told me once, about the differences between Elaerian and Sarks. Elaerian, like Revik and me, had a number of documented abilities that Sarks, or Sarhaciennes––meaning every other known seer––didn’t.

  One of those differences Vash mentioned had to do with physical matter.

  Elaerian could see physical objects from the Barrier.

  By that, Vash meant real physical objects, not imprints connected to physical objects, or the residual vibration from something alive touching a particular object, or the traces of seers using various physical objects as aleimic or construct anchors.

  Elaerian could see all of those things, too, but they also could see the objects themselves, which vibrated (according to Vash) at a completely different frequency.

  Sarks, Vash told me, could not.

  From the Barrier, Sarks estimated the location, size and shape of the physical world based on the presence of living things. The physical grew visible in its absence, or else in its relation to the living things around it. Sarks could see vibrations from certain purely physical phenomena, like electricity, seismic activity––even intense weather––but again that was only because those things gave off an aleimic charge that vibrated on a visible spectrum for them.

  Mostly, they guessed, extrapolated, deduced and inferred based on blueprints, maps and satellite coordinates, overlain with the aleimic fingerprints of living beings. They couldn’t actually see the physical world with anything but their physical eyes.

  Thinking about Vash’s words, I climbed out of the swivel chair, looking up at the dead machine. The other seers had dispersed around the room, hand-signaling to one another, examining different parts of the giant mainframe. Garensche hunched over another console across from me, peering at an even smaller screen and typing something into a keyboard there.

  Wreg seemed to be examining the outer casing of the machine itself, walking around and pausing wherever he saw wires or circuits exposed.

  I decided to test Vash’s assertion.

  I stretched out my light, holding the shield over the rest of them as I examined the mountain of metal from inside the Barrier. At first, all I saw was a vague outline of vibrating lines, something to do with the electricity coming off the machine as it sat there, sucking power.

  Then I looked for other frequencies, anything I might not have seen before.

  For a long moment, I didn’t know enough about what I was looking for to find it. I remembered seeing physical outlines before, when Revik first ripped open my light in San Francisco. I remembered seeing buildings as he ran with me down the street. I remembered seeing lampposts––even cars.

  All of that felt so long ago, though.

  Hell, I’d been pretty out of it; that might even have been a hallucination.

  Yet I remembered what the mountains felt like, when I tried to see them with my light from Revik’s room back in China. Thinking about that, I realized it didn’t have to be a machine, or anything man-made. Any physical object should work roughly the same way.

  I remembered how those mountains shone with a different kind of light.

  Slower somehow. Denser, like Vash said.

  They made a different sound. That was the closest I could come to describing it to myself. Like those low sounds only elephants hear, it was as if they lived beneath the higher, tighter hum of living light.

  As I remembered, the outline of the machine grew slowly visible.

  I blinked a few times in the space, but the outline remained.

  Staring at it, I realized the mainframe looked different from the buildings I remembered from San Francisco, and different from the mountains in China. Not only did the mainframe glow brighter than my memories of those mountains––or even the dead walls and asphalt roads of my first day as a seer––but a kind of structure hovered over it.

  It looked like a muddy gray, line-filled cloud.

  Once I’d convinced myself the structure was real, I tried to make sense of it.

  Composed of broken, twisted lines and pieces of that dense, aleimic matter, it exuded a sludge-like, gray light, a cartoon version of anger. I saw odd vibrations and collections of black lines, squiggles that left a metallic taste in my mouth, along with a heavy feeling that was strangely claustrophobic. Resonating with those slow-moving currents felt like a weight pressed down on my chest and the rest of my light.

  I also saw silver flickers in there, flashes and sparks that felt a lot like the light of the Dreng.

  Taking a breath, I slid my light further inside it.

  Immediately the structure expanded.

  It blew out into a kind of holographic diagram of the machine below.

  Studying the diagram in wonder, I found I could pick out parts of the machine that were older, that had functions degrading or even on the verge of failing outright. I could also see where most of the activity of processing was going on. I could see what had been repaired recently, and even new parts in some of the higher-processing segments.

  I just looked at it for a moment, trying to think.

  I sat back down at the terminal.

  This time, under “NAME?” I typed, “Dehgoies, Revik.”

  A record popped up on the screen that was a lot longer than mine.

  I glimpsed information about his time with British Intelligence, and even records from World War II, which I happened to know were mostly bogus. I also saw his status change over a number of different dates, from “registered” to “owned” to “affiliated clan status” then back to “owned.” The final designation said, “terrorist/insurgent,” with some kind of number code I couldn’t interpret. Of the skills they listed him as expert in, I only understood the descr
iptions of a little more than half.

  They knew, or “strongly suspected” he was telekinetic.

  They also listed “Syrimne” and “Syrimne d’Gaos” as aliases.

  I told the machine to delete that record, too.

  That time, I watched the holographic diagram I’d found around the machine as I gave the command. The request routed through the blueprint of the machine surprisingly fast, traveling to one area of the machine and then back with a smaller screen.

  “CONFIRM DELETE?”

  I told it yes.

  It asked me the reason.

  Again, I typed in, “DECEASED.”

  That time, the request went by a different pathway. I followed the record back to several different parts of the machine, where pieces of it seemed to be compiled in different areas. I saw it flip rapidly through millions of other records exactly like it, before removing the information from one part of the machine and placing it in another part of the machine altogether.

  So it didn’t actually delete them, I thought, clicking out.

  It only stored the information in a different set of files. It was likely more akin to changing a record from “active” status to “inactive” status.

  I motioned over Wreg. He complied, walking closer to where I sat.

  “What’s your full name?” I said. “To them, I mean?”

  “Yarensi, Thomas W.,” he said.

  I looked up at him, raising an eyebrow. He smiled.

  “My mother liked human names,” he said.

  “Do I even want to know what the ‘W’ stands for?” I said.

  “Wreg.”

  I smiled. “Sure it does.”

  “Bridge,” he subvocalized, a little exasperated. “This is not a practical means of disposing of records.”

  “I know,” I told him. “That’s not what I’m doing. Exactly.”

  Glancing cursorily at the record to make sure it was the right person, I looked for the ID tag. His implant had a code with a different prefix in front of it than either mine or Revik’s.

  “Where were you, when you were implanted?” I asked him.

  “Szechwan province,” he said.

  “Where was Revik? Do you know?”

  He gestured a negative.